Your EVP Has an Expiry Date

If your employee value proposition hasn't changed in the last 18 months, it probably should have. Not because the format is tired. Because your organisation has changed.

I chatted with Nick Homer recently about what’s next for employer branding. Nick heads up Employer Branding at Chapter 2, and he makes a case that's worth hearing: employer brand isn’t a marketing problem. It’s a reputation one. That might sound like a small distinction but it's not.

Nick has been making this argument publicly for a while, including a LinkedIn post - "Employer Brand is Dead. Long live reputation." And it got a lot of engagement, so it was time I caught up Nick and chatted about this.

The pattern most people in EB will recognise goes something like this. An organisation has a hiring challenge. Someone decides what they need is better employer brand content. A campaign gets made. Maybe an EVP refresh. A careers site. A hero film. Content goes out. The Glassdoor score stays where it is.

Nick put it in a way I thought was great:

”Sometimes the question can often be, how can we use our employer brand to get over the fact we’ve got a poor Glassdoor score? Rather than, if we’ve got a poor Glassdoor score, what are we going to do about it?”

Using employer brand to paper over something that hasn’t been fixed. You can produce the best career site in your sector, a compelling EVP, well-crafted social content. But if the experience people have when they arrive doesn’t match what you told them, none of it does what you need it to do.

Nick used the restaurant analogy during our chat: If your reviews say the food is poor, you don’t run a campaign about how great the food is. You fix the food. Then you tell people about it. The same logic applies to employer brand, but most organisations don’t operate that way.

There’s also something else we got into. The loyalty equation between employers and employees has shifted. When people can see redundancy decisions playing out in real time on LinkedIn, when AI is creating uncertainty about job security, reputation matters more than ever. And it isn’t built by campaigns. It’s built by what actually happens.

The thing we kept coming back to in our chat was the question of agility. How do you build an employer brand that keeps up with what’s actually going on inside an organisation?

Nick argues the EVP has to be treated as a living framework, not a static asset. I think he’s right.

”The EVP has to be organic and has to be iterative. If you’re still talking about the same thing that you were a year ago or 18 months ago, it should be actually a bit out of date just by the very nature of the companies changing.”

We also talked about what happens once someone is inside the business. An EVP that only works as an attraction tool is only doing half the job. There’s real opportunity to use it internally too, reinforcing what made the proposition compelling and being honest about the gaps. Most organisations running surveys already have data on projected tenure and what’s not landing. That data should be feeding into EB strategy.

The teams doing employer branding well right now aren’t necessarily producing the best content. They’re asking better questions. The content follows from that. It doesn’t lead it.

Here’s the full episode to watch or listen - would love to get your thoughts on this topic.

Thanks

Chris

Chris Le’cand-Harwood

Host, Employer Content Marketing

Founder, Content Marketing Pod Ltd